the end it took him six minutes and change. But at last the screen opened. The message was short. Far too short to have the effect it did.
Old acquaintance asking for you. Afraid I gave him wrong directions, but maybe he’ll find you anyway. Was a friendly when you knew him, but keep your eyes open.
He stared at the unsigned message. He didn’t need a signature, there was only one person who knew how to contact him this way. Who knew how to contact him at all. When he’d left that world he’d literally cashed out, cutting all ties. The man who’d sent him this email had spent a great deal of time convincing him to agree to this one thin thread of connection.
The message was innocuous enough on the surface, but he knew better. It was a warning as surely as if it were a fire alarm.
He’d spent most of his adult life knowing his past could catch up with him someday. That past held too many grim memories for him to relish the idea, but that didn’t change the possibility. He’d always looked upon it as a cost of doing business, his business at least.
But now there was Jordan, and that changed everything.
Knowing there was nothing more to be gained by staring at this unexpected jab from the past, he quickly typed one word that would serve as both acknowledgment and thanks, and sent it. Then he deleted the message, reset the encryption and exited. The small but sophisticated program would erase its own tracks as it went, and go back into hiding.
He had a little time, thanks to the misdirection, but he’d have to redouble his watchfulness. In the meantime, with that ability to compartmentalize that had worked so well for him back in those days, he returned to his original task.
When the social networking site was loaded, Wyatt called up the usual page and without a qualm entered the password Jordan didn’t know he knew. Then he hit the next link in the process.
My father has to be the most boring guy on the planet.
The first post since he’d last checked glowed at him.
Wyatt didn’t wince, even inwardly, at the damning—at least in a thirteen-year-old’s view—indictment. In fact, he felt a certain satisfaction. Boredom, he’d often thought, was highly underrated.
He went on reading, scrolling through the entries from where he’d left off last week. Jordan, of course, had no idea he knew the page existed. The boy had never asked if he could do it, had just set it up on his own shortly after they’d moved in. Perhaps he’d known if he’d asked the answer would be no. Better to beg forgiveness later and all that.
And that thought did make him wince. Hadn’t he lived by that credo himself, often enough?
And now Wyatt was glad he’d done it, and was using it against him. At least, that’s what Jordan would think. He went back to reading. He noticed the new friends added, made a note of a meet-up Jordan had been invited to next Saturday night. Invited several times by several people Wyatt already had been wary of after checking their respective pages. He didn’t like the sound of it, so he’d have to make sure his son was otherwise occupied.
He kept reading, and reached the final post.
I hate him. I wish he was dead and my mom was still alive.
The last entry sat there, unchanging, undeniable. He blinked. Closed the browser. Shut down the computer. Got up from the desk. Walked up the stairs. Opened the first door on the right.
Jordan lay curled up on his side, like his mother had said he used to sleep when he’d been much, much smaller. The room was a mess, clothes strewn about, belongings scattered. But he was there, and for the moment, safe. Wyatt went on down the hall to his own room.
Mechanically he went through the rituals of getting ready for sleep, as if that would help it come, or that it would be restful when it did. He knew what would happen. He would lie down, resisting the urge to draw up in a fetal curl himself. And then it would begin, the nightly parade of images and memories. And if he was really exhausted, the idea would occur to him that all the people around the world who had damned him were getting their wish.
He turned out the bedside light. His head hit the pillow.
He closed his eyes, wondering if this would be one of the nights he regretted going to sleep. In the silence of the house, broken only by the occasional creak or snap as it contracted in the rapidly chilling night air, the latest in the long string of confrontations played back in his head. He thought of all the things he’d done, all the places he’d been, all the situations he’d faced, all the times when he’d been written off as dead or likely to be.
He’d survived them all.
But he wasn’t at all sure he was going to survive a thirteen-year-old boy.
I hate him. I wish he was dead and my mom was still alive.
“So do I,” he whispered into the darkness.
Kai Reynolds heard the guitar riff signal from the front door of Play On as she got to the last line of the vendor form. She’d rigged the system to rotate through a series of recorded bits daily. This week it was the classics. Yesterday had been a few seconds of Stevie Ray, today was The Edge on her fave, that sweet Fender Strat, tomorrow would be the simplest and oldest, that classic single chord from George Harrison’s Rickenbacker 12-string that opened “A Hard Day’s Night.”
Next week it would be some Wylde, Rivers Cuomo and Mustaine balanced by a variety pack of Atkins and Robert Johnson leavened with a bit of Urban.
She took three seconds to finish checking the order against her inventory of guitar strings, then looked up. She quickly spotted who had come in, one who didn’t often have to ask because he usually knew, even from the three- to five-second clips, who was playing. For a kid his age, Jordan Price had a good ear.
An idea struck her, that she should add in some people he might not know. Ry Cooder, maybe, or Derek Trucks. And to bolster the feminine side, some of Raitt’s sweet slide and Batten’s two-handed tapping.
“Hey, Kai,” Jordan said, his face lighting up when he saw her behind the counter.
“Jordy,” she acknowledged with a return smile. The boy had told her some time ago, rather shyly, that he allowed no one else to use that nickname. She knew he had a bit of a crush on her, so she’d gently told him that someday he’d meet another girl he didn’t mind it from, and then he’d know she was the one.
“The Edge, right? The Stratocaster?”
“Right in one,” she said, her smile becoming a grin.
“You oughta put you in there.”
Her smile became a grin at the words he said at least two or three days a week when he came in after school. “Nah. I’m not in their league.”
“But that riff you did on Crash, that was killer.”
“I borrowed it from Knopfler.”
“But yours sounded completely different.”
“That was the Gibson, not me,” she said, as if they hadn’t had this conversation before. “What did you do, run all the way?”
The boy walked from the middle school that was about a mile away. Then, when he was done, he walked back to school, usually in haste, before his father got there to pick him up. She thought it odd, since she was closer to where the boy lived than the school was, but Jordy said his father insisted because he didn’t trust him.
“Should he?” she’d asked.
“Sure,” Jordy had answered, his expression grim. “Where am I gonna go in this town?”
There had been a wealth of disdain in his voice, but Kai had let it pass.
“Nah, it’s just hot out today,” he said now.
“Enjoy it. Fall’s hovering.” The boy made a